Tusculum College English professors Elizabeth Gordon and Zachary Jack will give a poetry reading on Friday, April 26, at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Annie Hogan Byrd Fine Arts Building.

The reading, scheduled as a culmination of Tusculum's celebration of National Poetry Month, will be one of the fine arts events occurring that evening on campus. A reception for the artists participating in Tusculum's annual Student Art Exhibition will be from 6-9 p.m. in the Allison Gallery across the hall from the Annie Hogan Byrd auditorium.

Elizabeth Gordon, an assistant professor of English at Tusculum, received her master's degree in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with poets Michael S. Harper and C.D. Wright. She has been a featured reader, along with Cathy Song and Jewel Gomez, in Brown's Woman Poets Series, and has shared the stage with Galway Kinnell and Forrest Gander as part of the Pawtucket Arts Council's Poetry Prize awards.

Gordon's poems, stories, and reviews have been published in literary magazines including Slant, Cutbank, New Millennium Writings, Green Mountains Review, and The Prose Poem: An International Journal. She has been anthologized in Home to Stay (Greenfield Review Press) and Tilting the Continent (New Rivers Press), as well as in several college textbooks.

She has received grants and awards for her writing from the Pawtucket Arts Council in Rhode Island, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Ropewalk Writers Retreat in Indiana. On May 9 in Knoxville, Gordon will participate in "The Art of Words," a poetry reading held in conjunction with the spring show of A1LabArts, a visual arts organization based in that city.

Zachary Jack, an assistant professor of English at Tusculum, is the author of the chapbook The Story of Grief (Oeoco Press, 2000), winner of the 2000 Prentice Hall Prize for Poetry, and a 2000 Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses) nominee.

He has been a poet-in-residence at Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Center, Mexico's Great River Arts Institute, and New York's Blue Mountain Center. His poems have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, Hayden's Ferry and the Louisville Review. New work is forthcoming in the New Orleans Review and in Zone 3.

Jack, who lives in Afton with wife Melissa, was born and raised on a Century Farm outside of Mechanicsville, Iowa. His great-grandfather, Walter Thomas Jack, was a farmer and writer, authoring the book The Furrow and Us.

He earned Master in Fine Arts degree from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and was a Teaching Writing Fellow at the University of Alabama in 2000. Jack has worked as a children's librarian, writer-in-the-schools, and newspaper editor. He also was the assistant producer for visiting writer interviews on Alabama Public Radio's "Sunday Magazine."